Truck platooning is well known in the industry to create road trains, where two or more trucks follow each other closely or “draft” off of one another. Trucks in such a convoy drive very close together, significantly reducing aerodynamic drag and increasing fuel-efficiency. The smaller the gap between the vehicles, the better the fuel economy.
Technology is being developed to create semi-autonomous platoons of trucks that are controlled by a lead vehicle through wireless communication. The trucks would constantly maintain a communication link that would allow them to share data and action. For instance, if the lead truck's collision avoidance system activates its brakes, the following truck or trucks would do the same. However, one reason that such automated platooning technology has not yet been implemented is the safety concerns caused by platooning trucks.
Currently trucks do not have dedicated lanes or roads. As such, platooning trucks must share the roadway with passenger vehicles that may be unaware of the “rules” of platooning. Unfortunately, with such a small gap between platooning trucks, cut-offs and cut-ins by passenger vehicles sharing the road are common and dangerous. When a passenger vehicle cuts in between two platooning trucks, the rear truck must respond and brake appropriately to attain a safe following distance behind the encroaching vehicle. Although modern technologies (such as adaptive cruise control) allow a vehicle to sense and respond to a developing crash situation faster than a human driver, the technologies are limited by the speed of the vehicles, the distance between the vehicles, etc. The potential of cut-ins can be reduced by more closely spacing the trucks, however, if a cut-in does occur, it can be an even more critical safety situation than if the trucks were spaced further apart. Increasing the spacing between trucks may provide more time for the rear platooning truck to react to a cut-in, however, the increased spacing encourages more cut-ins and lessens the fuel economy effects of the platoon.
Accordingly, a system and method for increasing the safety of platooning trucks is desired. Such a system and method would beneficially work with trucks of various fleets that either manually draft off one another or that are synced electronically if/when such a system is implemented. Moreover, such a system and method would be beneficially easy and cost-effective to implement on both new and used trucks, as well as easy to use.